Sooooo wait, ‘The Simpsons’ might be based in Australia?
Please don’t blame us for not picking up on this sooner, but we’ve gotta talk about The Simpsons. The show is filled with so many tiny jokes and gags that it’s hard to take everything in on the first watch — honestly we’d probably need to watch forever before we picked up on everything. And BTW there are a lot of Simpsons episodes. So with so many tiny details to be thinking about and so many episodes to take in, it’s totally understandable that none of us ever thought that The Simpsons might be based in Australia — until right now. I mean, the Simpsons live in “Springfield,” and Springfield happens to be the name of MANY cities in the U.S. of A. The Simpsons is also an American show so, we’ll go ahead and say it — we just assumed the Simpsons lived in the U.S.!
But here’s whats up, Simpsons fans: The shape of the moon is all wrong for Springfield to be in the United States. Yes we’ve all assumed they’re an American family, but the moon depicted in the January 25th episode suggests otherwise.
Simpsons mega fan, astronomer and Slate blogger, Phil Plait noticed that the moon in “The Musk Who Fell to Earth” was backwards. In the northern hemisphere, the points of a waxing crescent moon point to the left. In this Simpsons episode, the points of the waxing crescent moon are pointing to the right. The points of the moon only point to the right in the southern hemisphere, where Australia is located. Also parts of Africa, South America, a few Asian islands and Antarctica. If we’re go judge location by this moon, the Simpsons could be set in any one of those locations. My mind is both boggled and blown at the same time.
Of course, this could also just be how the animator drew the moon.
I guess the only thing to do is now comb through all 564 Simpsons episodes to date, and see if we can spot the moon in any of them and see if the moon is pointing in all the right American directions. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Image via here.
